31
4
1179

About the Author

sarahanne

view my other 2587 articles

www.fasterlouder.com.au

FasterLouder presents YeasayerSplendour sideshows

Fri 7th May, 2010 in Local News

Experimental rockers Yeasayer have just announced they will be played two sideshows whilst in Australia for Splendour In The Grass.

The Brooklyn based band were last in Australia in 2008, wowing fans with their unique brand of “middle-eastern, choral and electronic psych rock “ and showing of songs from their critically acclaimed debut album All Hour Cymbals.

When they retrun to Australia this July they do so armed with tunes from their beautiful new album Odd Blood which was described by the Guardian as “a masterclass in modern, multicultural, weirdo pop music”.

FasterLouder presents the beautiful Yeasayer playing the following Splendour In The Grass sideshows:

Wed Jul 28 – Metro Theatre, Sydney
Thu July 29 – Prince Bandroom, Melbourne

Tickets on sale Friday 14th May

Check out photos from Yeasayer’s last sojourn down under.

Comments

www.fasterlouder.com.au

arrow left

Add Another | View all the comments in forum »

32021

JaneMelanie

JaneMelanie said on the 7th May, 2010

clash with foals sydney sideshow -devooooooooo

lineofbestfit

lineofbestfit said on the 7th May, 2010

w.w.h.d.
what will hipsters do.

Braveheart81

Braveheart81 said on the 7th May, 2010

w.w.h.d.
what will hipsters do.

Ask their Hiptop Slides for advice. Whatever a Hiptop Slide is.

Stefan Beck

Stefan Beck said on the 7th May, 2010

I believe it's an old,old wooden phone used in the civil war era.

Alexphotosite

Alexphotosite said on the 7th May, 2010

HAHAHAHA!!!! Yeasayer is awesome!

lineofbestfit

lineofbestfit said on the 7th May, 2010

unlike the fielding brothers who are talentless show ponies, yes yes they have thier moments. you can tell lucy i said that too :rolleyes:

Napoleon Solo

Napoleon Solo said on the 7th May, 2010

Yeasayer have toured before, the Hipsters only have themselves to blame.
Foals it is for me.

lineofbestfit

lineofbestfit said on the 7th May, 2010

but that was before the nu wave of brooklyn indie bands.

Napoleon Solo

Napoleon Solo said on the 7th May, 2010

They still should have been on to it unless their Hipster XP level was too low.

Lucky Rice

Lucky Rice said on the 7th May, 2010

heeyyy... i could go to this on my way up to splendour :)

Alexphotosite

Alexphotosite said on the 7th May, 2010

READ!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/feb/25/yeasayer-odd-blood

Two years ago I was in San Francisco reporting on the soon-to-be-supernova MGMT. At their gig in the city I was blown away by the support band. Yeasayer wore unfashionable clothes and had hair tumbling to their waists – they looked as if they'd been blasted in from the San Francisco of 40 years before. But their melodies were stunning, an uncategorisable ambient haze of psychedelia, world music and krautrock. I remember telling MGMT's Ben Goldwasser – as diplomatically as I could under the circumstances – that the opening act were one of the best new bands I'd ever seen.

"Er, they are really good," he replied, with a tiny frown, his own enthusiasm perhaps tempered by having to follow them every night.

Two years on, Yeasayer are gazing into their laptops in a dressing room at Manchester University, midway through one of the hottest tours this year. They no longer look like hippies, but singer Chris Keating remembers that night in San Francisco. "Actually we co-headlined," he smiles. "Some nights we'd go on after them. We didn't even have a record out, but that tour was a riot every night. We're still good friends. It was just was so obvious that they were gonna blow up,"

Two years later, it could be Yeasayer's turn. According to aggregator website the Hype Machine, they are now officially world's most blogged-about band. Yeasayer's second album Odd Blood – the follow-up to 2008's All Hour Cymbals – has also been receiving mostly rapturous reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. However, the Yeasayer of 2010 are very different to the band of 2008. Keating's tour reading is a new biography of David Bowie, and his band have undergone the kind of transformation the thin white duke excelled at in his heyday. Low-mixed vocals and frazzling guitars are out. In come sweet pop melodies, Indian sounds, hip-hop drums and tons of electronics.

Before their Manchester show, Keating describes their debut as "a globalisation album – sounding like artefacts of different times and cultures thrown together". The more obviously pop-friendly Odd Blood is "pushing that further into the future, with electronic drums, industrial percussion and reggaeton beats". He hopes that fans of All Hour Cymbals will come with them, and new ones will embrace them. "We like taking people into weird worlds," he says.

However, for all the fuss, Odd Blood charted only at No 64 in the UK (and 63 in the US) – which is hardly equalling the success of MGMT, or another band who've melded world music and indie, Vampire Weekend. "I don't wanna be that band that's shoved down everybody's throats," says multi-instrumentalist Anand Wilder. "I'd rather be that weird band under the radar that writes really catchy songs." If offered, support gigs in big arenas would be turned down because "it's their world", says bassist Ira Wolf Tuton. "Our world may be smaller, but we can control it."

But can they keep it that way?

As they become more successful, Tuton notes, outside forces are reaching in, "trying to mould us". The Manchester show has been sold out for weeks and Keating later tells the crowd that it will be the last time they see Yeasayer in a small venue. "I did Roots Manuva when he was breaking but it wasn't as crazy as this," says the band's tour manager, a big Yorkshireman who has coaxed Brooklyn's finest into touring the UK wearing laminates reading "Leeds United FC", and who says the tour's soundtrack has been a clamour of journalists requesting interviews: "One publication even approached them for an interview in the kebab shop." After the triumphant show, the band even receive the time-honoured sign of a breaking band: teenage girls who have sneaked into the dressing room. "Oh my God," shrieks one of them on glimpsing Tuton topless. He's horrified.

"I'm not sure we're that kind of band," he sighs later. "We're used to a mixed crowd: the gay black guy, an older couple, T-shirted indie kids. We're not some synthesiser boy band. We're more used to being mobbed by 50-year-old dudes." Yeasayer's varied audience reflects their own make-up: Tuton is American-Irish, Keating's father was born in London and Wilder was one of Baltimore's few South Asian-Americans. "In school there was a Thai kid, a Japanese kid, an Indian [Native American] kid and me," he smiles. "But I never experienced racism. We were all just trying harder to be weird and unique."

Yeasayer's magpie music also reflects their constant banter, which has led to the creation of some myths about them. Keating's joke about being bullied every day at school now features in every article about them. But they can't help themselves. Keating tells me they found Tuton "in a methadone clinic". In fact, his sister is married to Wilder's cousin. When all three relocated to Brooklyn, Yeasayer were born.

But their early sound – derived from "shamelessly ripping off" tapes of Iraqi radio and listening to Popul Vuh, Tangerine Dream and Fleetwood Mac – reacted against prevailing New York trends. "Everyone was trying to be the next Strokes or Bravery," says Wilder, "so we wanted to subvert that and trick people into liking really uncool music." Their hippie look was also a statement: "You see all these bands where it was obvious someone told them to wear those shoes with that coat," sighs Keating. "They just end up all looking the same."

We were never Brooklyn darlings," Keating says the following day, before a gig in Leeds. "The local promoters didn't think we were very cool. Cos we didn't dress right and we didn't sound lo-fi enough and we did three-part harmonies. But we were lucky enough to open for our friends like Dirty Projectors: [promoters] grudgingly had to accept that we were a band."

One New York promoter, though, led the charge on their behalf, giving them repeated shows after the band had showed they could bring an audience, albeit one assembled by texting all their friends. Outside New York, it was harder – in Cleveland, they once played to four people. But the big break was on the way. Tracks on MySpace found their way to one Jason Foster, a southern indie maverick who believes in David Icke's "lizard people" theories and became their unlikely manager.

"When we met him he said 'What? You boys didn't grow up chewing tobacco? You didn't spit into a cup?'" says Keating with a snigger. But it was Foster's management – and his establishment of a label, We Are Free Records – that led to All Hour Cymbals. That album captures a post-Katrina, post-Iraq war sense of global panic, specifically in standout song 2080's mantra: "I can't sleep when I think about the times we're living in." But those songs have all but disappeared from the live set – as has drummer Luke Fasano, replaced by two new musicians after exiting over "musical and personal differences". Odd Blood is more radio-friendly, but hasn't lost its predecessor's soul.

"On the first album we were picking these grand themes," says Wilder. "On this album we weren't afraid to talk about feelings and what makes us sad."

Being around Yeasayer over two days is to glimpse into what it feels like when a band start to realise their lives are changing forever. Not long ago, they were driving trucks for Saturday Night Live. Tuton, in a spell as a carpenter, fitted recessed lighting in Kanye West's house – "six colours, so he could walk in and think 'I want that one'" – now West's blog provides weblinks to Yeasayer videos. Keating reveals how his model for the band's slow-building career is REM – a band he loves – "especially their early days, when they could play 150 shows a year and not have to worry about paying the bills until the fifth or sixth album."

But right now, perusing his emails, he has more personal concerns. "My wife's had cable television installed," he sighs. "This is where it starts to go wrong and we all end up as junkies."

Yeasayer play Bristol Thekla tonight, and tour the UK again in May. Odd Blood is out now on Mute/EMI

Stefan Beck

Stefan Beck said on the 7th May, 2010

Ah yes,but similarly:

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass slightly less than one-thousandth of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Together, these four planets are sometimes referred to as the Jovian planets.

The planet was known by astronomers of ancient times and was associated with the mythology and religious beliefs of many cultures. The Romans named the planet after the Roman god Jupiter.When viewed from Earth, Jupiter can reach an apparent magnitude of −2.94, making it on average the third-brightest object in the night sky after the Moon and Venus. (Mars can briefly match Jupiter's brightness at certain points in its orbit.)

Jupiter is primarily composed of hydrogen with a quarter of its mass being helium; it may also have a rocky core of heavier elements. Because of its rapid rotation, Jupiter's shape is that of an oblate spheroid (it possesses a slight but noticeable bulge around the equator). The outer atmosphere is visibly segregated into several bands at different latitudes, resulting in turbulence and storms along their interacting boundaries. A prominent result is the Great Red Spot, a giant storm that is known to have existed since at least the 17th century when it was first seen by telescope. Surrounding the planet is a faint planetary ring system and a powerful magnetosphere. There are also at least 63 moons, including the four large moons called the Galilean moons that were first discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Ganymede, the largest of these moons, has a diameter greater than that of the planet Mercury.

Jupiter has been explored on several occasions by robotic spacecraft, most notably during the early Pioneer and Voyager flyby missions and later by the Galileo orbiter. The most recent probe to visit Jupiter was the Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft in late February 2007. The probe used the gravity from Jupiter to increase its speed. Future targets for exploration in the Jovian system include the possible ice-covered liquid ocean on the moon Europa.

Braveheart81

Braveheart81 said on the 7th May, 2010

You lost me at Read!

Napoleon Solo

Napoleon Solo said on the 7th May, 2010

I read for a bit and then discovered there was no point and quickly stopped.

Alexphotosite

Alexphotosite said on the 7th May, 2010

daverh

daverh said on the 7th May, 2010

140 characters or less plz. Twitter demands it.

Will be a tough choice but I think I'll go with Foals.

Alexphotosite

Alexphotosite said on the 7th May, 2010

See everyone's gonna go with Foals but Yeasayer will be the one that is remembered as a more amazing gig. Something special.

Napoleon Solo

Napoleon Solo said on the 7th May, 2010

What are you talking about? You are telling me which gig is better before they have even happened based on your personal preference.
I saw them both at Lollapalooza, Yeasayer were good but Foals were so brilliant they left me counting the days till they toured Australia. I like Yeasayer but there is no way you could definitively estimate who would be better 3 months out. They have both released great albums this year.

Alexphotosite

Alexphotosite said on the 8th May, 2010

Yep, that's what I'm telling you. That TAFE course in psychic studies sure did pay off!

Rennie said on the 8th May, 2010

yeasayer live at the corner in 2008 were pretty dull. good albums but not sood live. think i'll head to foals over this.....

mondo22

mondo22 said on the 9th May, 2010

farkkkkk. would love to have gone to another sideshow. oh well, splendour and pukkelpop will do.

antheatrazza said on the 9th May, 2010

i would definately go to this, yeasayer's new album is spectacular

Alexphotosite

Alexphotosite said on the 10th May, 2010

Tis tisn't tit?

mondo22

mondo22 said on the 10th May, 2010

Both albums are gems in their own right.

spintheblackcircle

spintheblackcircle said on the 14th May, 2010

melbourne show sold out in 20 minutes.

Napoleon Solo

Napoleon Solo said on the 14th May, 2010

Melbourne punters are always good like that.

Dylan29

Dylan29 said on the 14th May, 2010

Foals>>Yeasayer.

Still would be good if they sold out Sydney too and added a date the night before.

laenij

laenij said on the 18th May, 2010

foals>>yeasayer.

still would be good if they sold out sydney too and added a date the night before.

i agree with this; i'm already going to be up for lcd/hot chip (since melbourne, again, sold out quite quickly.) on the monday...adding another day to my trip wouldn't be hard.

Braveheart81

Braveheart81 said on the 29th Jul, 2010

Spot the trendy hipsters.

Disappointing lack of costume...

http://imagecache-cdn.fasterlouder.com.au/879/420_280/e7b22_879911.jpg

Napoleon Solo

Napoleon Solo said on the 29th Jul, 2010

Guy in the background oozes intrigue.

Braveheart81

Braveheart81 said on the 29th Jul, 2010

You'd also be intrigued if you were standing behind Alex.